Jack Dorsey, CEO at Block, announced a new Bitcoin Lightning Network (LN) service provider called “C=.” According to an official announcement, the new service is part of the TBD initiative, which aims to create a suite of BTC-based tools to give users more control over their finances.

Hey LN

We’re here https://t.co/NzAKpVqgDz

— c = (@c_equals) March 2, 2023

The Lightning Network is a second-layer payment solution that allows users to send and receive BTC “off-chain.” The solutions speed up transacting on this blockchain and avoid long waiting periods to validate a transaction on the network.

TBD’s New Project And Bitcoin As The Future of Payments

Per the announcement, C= will build the infrastructure to allow people to leverage Bitcoin’s second-layer solution and to support the “future of payments.” The new service provider identified the lack of liquidity in the LN as a major issue for its adoption and future.

Via their official Twitter handle, they stated:

Liquidity from reliable nodes can be hard to come by when you need it, making payments difficult. We want to make it easy and reliable for you to send and receive payments over Lightning. We’ve been working behind the scenes with the cats Spiral to cook up a routing node that will make Lightning easier and more dependable for businesses and people that transact on the network.

The new service provider is looking for partners from different sectors with different needs to work on their LN-based payment infrastructure. In the long run, C= wants to bring a billion users to the BTC ecosystem and improve the current payment rails.

BTC Lightning On A Bull Rull

The Bitcoin Lightning Network has been growing fast over the past two years. This second-layer payment solution is seeing critical adoption levels, even as the crypto market trends to the downside.

As Bitcoinist reported in October last year, research firm Messari recorded an exponential increase in the LN public capacity. In other words, there was more liquidity in the payment solution, which allowed more people to send payments.

The chart below shows that the LN capacity has been steadily growing, despite BTC’s price performance, since November 2018. The crypto market was also experiencing a broad market downtrend at that time. Unlike the nascent sector, the Lightning network continues to push upward.

Cover image from Unsplash, chart from Tradingview.